~ insanitybytes

Mirrors and Conundrums

D. Patrick Collins wrote a good post called The Mirror. It’s Snow White, so what’s not to love? 🙂

I’d like to play off his post a bit, first because I love fairy tales but also because I’ve been thinking along similar lines lately, specifically narcissism, entitlement, and envy.

Recently someone mentioned The Problem of Evil, the conundrum between the fact that God is good, always…….and yet we suffer in the world. I said there is no conundrum and I meant that, but what I meant was that I don’t wrestle with the problem of suffering, I don’t perceive it as a conundrum, but of course it is a well established paradox, a frequently debated subject. It’s real enough.

Ah yes, I was busy gazing in the mirror and saying, what conundrum? I don’t see a stinking conundrum at all! There’s no conundrum here…..

A conundrum is, a confusing and difficult problem or question. Or the more fun version, a question asked for amusement, typically one with a pun in its answer; a riddle. “How can God be good …..and yet we suffer?” I suppose that is not a very amusing riddle when you are the one suffering, but it is a mystery most of us must chase at some point in life.

I learned a harsh truth long ago having grown up in what amounted to 3rd world poverty, while also surrounded by poor spirits, the truth being that we are actually entitled to nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not food, shelter, good health, human rights, or even love. Not even our breath is our own. If you have breath, there’s your first thing to be grateful for. It’s a terribly low place to find oneself trapped in, but it teaches you something valuable. There are real treasures hidden in being brought so low. You learn that apart from Him, I am nothing.

When you step from what amounts to 3rd world poverty into first world poverty it can be a bit of culture shock. Good grief, are we entitled! Food, shelter, clothing, running water, electricity, transportation, health care, television, civil rights, fair treatment, safety, crime free neighborhoods, a good wi/fi signal……and the fruit of our labors. If I put in the effort, I better get the darn reward. Sheesh, and don’t even think about cutting in front of me in traffic. I’m a good person, so I’m entitled to all of these things and if I don’t get them, I’ve been slighted, wronged, demoted, and somebody is going to pay.

God Himself has betrayed me if I suffer any discomfort. When bad things happen to us we actually call them “acts of God.” I’m a good person, so it would be unjust for a tornado to hit me! Or, my life is not going down the path I planned out, unfair Lord, unfair…

Back to D. Patrick’s The Mirror, we not only think we’re beautiful, we think we’re good! Deserving, entitled. We have a right to not only be beautiful, but to be the fairest of all and to avoid all suffering and inconvenience that might suggest otherwise. The Queen in Snow White sends the woodcutter off to cut her step daughter’s heart out, so she’s not messing around. She’s entitled to be the fairest of all, no matter what it takes.

Our sense of entitlement, our own vanity, our belief that we are good, has a whole lot to do with why the “goodness of God versus the existence of suffering” feels like a conundrum to us, an unexplainable mystery that just won’t jibe. The cognitive dissonance is actually all on our end. God is not puzzled, we are. Hopefully that comes as no surprise.

When you strip away the fairy tale, (and we’ll call Western civilization a fairy tale,) and return to the harsh reality of life, one devoid of all comfort and love, things begin to make a lot more sense. We are entitled to nothing. If we’re lucky we come into the world with our breath. We aren’t even entitled to survive. Without the benevolence of someone, babies die within a few days. We are not even entitled to the fruits of our labors, locust can devour those in a flash. “Why do we suffer,” is actually an elitist question, one that stems from having been insulated from the harsh truth and realities of the world. Strip away all the illusions and no one asks that at all, we’re far more puzzled and surprised by the fact that we’ve somehow managed to survive another day.

I’ve wrestled to teach this truth to four millennial kids now, unwilling of course to expose them to the kind of suffering I grew up with, and yet watching the world teach them to gaze into that mirror more and more obsessively, perceiving life as their personal fairy tale, one they can mold into their own version of reality, untroubled by well, by truth and reality. It’s been a real battle, this is a tough lesson to accept, a tough one to believe is true, especially if you haven’t experienced it first hand.

That’s been my conundrum, because I didn’t want life to sneak up on them, I didn’t want them to be suddenly confronted by the harsh truth and reality of the world, completely unprepared, believing themselves to be good, therefore fully entitled to a fairytale written by their own beautiful hand. Life has a way of rudely throwing you curve balls you didn’t ask for.

D.Patrick Collins says, “But the paradoxical beauty of the Christian life is that through the death of Jesus Christ, we become all the beauty we do not otherwise possess. Through a forgiveness that transcends both outward and inward realities, He removes from us all that is not beautiful.”

Indeed. There is a fairytale, a real one, a kingdom far away and yet nearby, a place of genuine truth and beauty. When you’re in the bottom of a pit looking up and asking, is God good, you realize that your very definition of “what is good,” springs from God Himself. God is the definition of what is good, He is the longing we feel in our souls, He is the fairytale we try so hard to write for ourselves. He is the one who wrote the script our hearts are seeking.

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92 thoughts on “Mirrors and Conundrums”

I think there’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer stubs his toe at church in front of the Crucifix and says, “Why do bad things always happen to ME?!?”
Everything’s about perspective- as long as we can hang on through this funhouse ride of ups and downs and learn something, it’s “all good.”

It is all good, isn’t it? “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Your fun house ride reminds me of how we people don’t even know what we really want. Put me a little cage, spin me around, fling me through the air, sounds really awful and yet we’re enthusiastically off to the carnival to do just that. And if you’re young, the goal is to make yourself as sick and dizzy as possible…..for fun. 🙂

Suffering isn’t built into the nature of things. God created a world in which suffering didn’t exist and gave humans authority over it. We have all sinned and one of the effects of our sin is the existence of suffering.

LOL! Gratuitous has a double meaning, Zande. It can mean, “uncalled for” or it can mean “provided free of charge.”

A huge part of our own suffering is caused by man, by sin, as Clyde pointed out. God created a perfect world for us, free of charge, no death, no suffering.

If you really get out into nature, start observing, there’s nothing gratuitous about it, it’s like a well conducted orchestra, each part serving a purpose, this remarkable symbiosis going on that speaks of a well crafted design. It’s uncalled for, says who Zande? By Who’s standard do we measure such things?Who gives us that sense of injustice? Who makes us feel bad when the bigger fish eats the little one? The fish sure aren’t sitting around thinking, this is totally uncalled for, unfair, unjust.

The evil which is amplifying through Creation is there for a purpose, there by design, growing, evolving, and it is evolving because the architect of this world—the Creator—not only draws some manner of critical pleasure from its existence, but more importantly, craves its augmentation over time.

BY WHOSE STANDARD DO WE MEASURE SUCH THINGS? Suffering? Evil? What evil? Sez who?

A fine question, and a rare gift of intellectual mastery, waiting to be opened carefully and slowly like a worthy package. In addition, WHAT standard are we also using. Without ultimate truth, he with the cleverest imagination wins the day.

The proposition that evil exists because the maximally-equipped Creator has somehow lost control over some (or all) of his creation is conspicuously absurd.

There are no mistakes.

There can be no mistakes.

God, by definition, is maximally competent.

God, by definition, is maximally efficient.

There can be no mistakes, no missteps, no lapses or miscalculations. There is neither room nor capacity for little rebellions, let alone the yielding of even the smallest fraction of Creation to some obnoxious insurgency, and if something is error-free then what exists exists for a reason, a purpose.

Evil exists, therefore, because it is meant to exist, and to even suggest it is the result of some personal ineptitude or imbecilic blunder in the design is athletically—historically—preposterous.

So, tell me John, what is more likely: that a maximally competent, maximally powerful Creator has lost total control of His creation (an act of sheer and utter incompetence), or that Creation is performing precisely as desired by a mistake-free being?

So you think that so-called ‘smart people’ who agree with you make your case?

Is this you quoting yourself to somehow allege that the challenge I put forth is now answered? (which challenge cannot be won by any rational mind, that is, that the Genesis account presents God as very good)

God in His infinite wisdom, created all that is, and that creation was good. Very good. Worth repeating.

But a finer question was put to you: By WHOSE standard do you judge such things?

Ha. If there is no Creator which is really the point of our friend, then purpose is futile, non existent even.

If there is a Creator, (since there is a Creator) He is obviously not surprised at the deeds of the occasional miscreant, and while He at all times is good, we at many times only have ourselves to blame.

And oh btw, if God is maximally evil………….how then pray tell, and where would it even be possible, for grace and truth to be revealed…………what mortal could begin to dream such things…………

So once more, we see that His word is sure and steadfast, like an anchor for the soul even. At least we can enjoy fine talk like fellows on a ship………in the midst of the attempted coup. So here’s a toast to you msb, on this fine Friday. 😉 😉

And yet john, the fact that your outstretched hand to feed the sparrow is met with fear and dread of you by him, all the while you would not hurt a feather, escapes your notice, that it is NOT by evolution that he flees for its life…..

……….but because ‘the whole creation groans until now………’ yes, in elation, but also in a change of things brought about by that little inconvenient thing and fact of life known as s.i.n. Not a pretty word.

2nd law of thermodymanics kinda thing. But rest assured, the God who has science under His thumb, is not aloof nor surprised.

And ask yourself also, why the common dove has not evolved to the point of escaping his evil partner, who to this day, are still seen in wonderful pairs.

Then there is the rainbow………… 😉 But that’s an evil sight too I suppose………..

As to your designer, scripture presents God, not god, as in one of many, but as in solely the One and only Creator.

Get that? Scripture presents Him. Not you, I have no interest in the endless gopher holes which do not present the God of the scriptures. Time is entirely too short to engage in eternal smokescreens and questions which have long been settled.

“There is neither room nor capacity for little rebellions, let alone the yielding of even the smallest fraction of Creation to some obnoxious insurgency, and if something is error-free then what exists exists for a reason, a purpose.”

Those are words spoken through weakness, fear, insecurity, all signs of a desperate need for control. In truth, genuine authority is so all powerful and secure in Who it is, that it really can yield to some “obnoxious insurgency.” In fact, yielding, letting go of control to pockets of rebellion, can be an act of love.

Take a breath, Inanity… You’re getting yourself all knotted up in your own contradictions.

You said originally, speaks of a well crafted design, to which I agree… and yet now you’re trying to argue that there is no design, but rather an insurgency, a rebellion loose in the world.

Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.

There is design. That is certain, and as the great William Paley attested:

“Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”

The predominant tendency of the contrivance does not lie. The pattern to complexity, and complexity to greater evil, is historical. It is quantifiable and it is predictable.

This world you want (for emotional reasons only) to call “good” is a complexity machine: a self-enriching engine spilling out from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity where the greater talents awarded to each succeeding generation of things have always produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Is it not the case that this particular rocky world of genes and then memes produced prokaryotes before eukaryotes, fashioned ion channels before primitive action potentials, engendered neuroreceptors before antique nerve nets, birthed bilateral nervous systems before central nervous systems, spawned pons before hindbrains, issued cerebellums before cerebrums, grew white matter before grey matter, fathered talons before arrow tips, hatched incisors before hydrogen bombs, welcomed hunter-gatherers before gunsmiths, minted potters before chemical engineers, and begot corporeal barter systems before ethereal derivative trading?

This strikes to the heart of Paley’s observation, and manifestly, Inanity, this passage from the simple to the complex is not a mistake. This habitual, intuitive urge to self-embellishment is not an accident. Tensions stitched into the deepest recesses of Creation have always favoured one direction for the sweet debris of existence to be expelled, and that debris field is a 13.82 billion years long record of increasing orders of suffering.

Creation, Inanity, is a living museum to the evolution of evil. By simple but persuasive design the old and the ordinary yield to the new and the exciting, and with the new comes more energetic and capable families of physiological, emotional, psychological and, more recently, economic and technological pain. Indeed, for organisms whose fitness depends only on their own sequence information, physical complexity (be it genetic, behavioural, cultural, technological or economic) must always increase, and as it does so too does that organism’s exposure to an ever more potent ecology of potential suffering; both real and, with the appropriate neurological capacity, imagined in a million busy little paranoia’s.

This is an established and irrefutable historical fact of this world…. Do you want to discuss it, discuss reality?

LOL! Oh Zande, if you misunderstand me so comically, why would you even believe yourself worthy to understand the nature of creation itself? I’m hardly complex or mysterious and yet you’ve missed the boat so eloquently there.

In truth Zande, I grew up under some pretty harsh circumstances. For “emotional reasons” I very much wanted the world to be bad. That was my comfort zone. That was my emotional peace. That is what I wanted to be true of the world around me. Evil, pointless, bad. Love is actually excruciatingly painful, goodness is a blinding Light. When you truly see Him, you also have to go back and have a hard look at how far we’ve truly fallen, what has been lost. It sure isn’t a task for the emotionally comfortable, let me tell you.

“Evil” is defined here as the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced.”

Ah, the delicious misery of childbirth, something I wish I’d done a dozen more times, the tears and grief of lost love, the sorrow of good-byes. These are all precious things, priceless things, desired suffering even. Thank God for the pain of life, Zande. Most of it is actually not evil at all, but a great blessing, a desired state of being even.

A God who would take away all my earthly suffering, would be a cruel God indeed.

@john: You have presented a well-reasoned argument, but if you do not mind me saying so with equal force, it is unfortunately not the Christian position. The Biblical account is not that God has somehow lost control of his creation. On the contrary, in mankind’s rebellion, God remains very much in charge.

“Evil exists, therefore, because it is meant to exist, and to even suggest it is the result of some personal ineptitude or imbecilic blunder in the design is . . . preposterous.” Correct. Evil is meant to exist, from the standpoint of God allowing it to exist. This is what it means in Genesis when God declares, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Mankind’s rebellion did not take God by surprise: He programmed the possibility of mankind choosing evil into the design of the world, and even notified mankind of its possibility and its consequence.

I am afraid you may be a victim of bad theology, which states something to the effect that God is too good to have allowed evil or its consequence, leading you to conclude both must be an unaccounted-for design flaw. But in orthodox Christian thought, God’s goodness is not so defined. He is good in granting mankind freewill to choose good or evil, good in executing judgment against those who choose evil, and also good in extending mercy unto the forgiveness of sin through His Son Jesus Christ. The design is functioning properly, even I would suggest in the circumstances of your own life, up to the present moment.

I’m not litigating the claims made in that religion. I am instead proposing that you have all mischaracterised the nature of the Creator.

Your explanation of the narrative is fascinating, though. Ignoring the fact that we are, in reality, looking at 13.8 billion years of evolutionary history, not 5,000 as it appears you are trying to argue, what you’re saying is your creator is malicious, purposefully seeding evil.

That’s interesting. Are you aware it negates the thesis of a perfectly good god? But to stick with your particular narrative a little longer, that narrative does present one of two possibilities: 1) an evil god, or 2) a thoroughly incompetent one.

By the bibles own chronology of events, the angels were created before the earth, and the earth before man (Job 38:4-7). Evil, however, entered Creation before the earth, and therefore before man… an event witnessed in the fall of Yhwh’s most beautiful creation, Lucifer (Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14). Creation, therefore, was diseased before the earth was even shaped, and the tumour Christianity blames on Adam was already growing before Yhwh fashioned man. The angels fell before man. Original sin does not lay at Adams feet, but the angels.

Therefore, by the story’s own chronology, Yhwh brought man into an already infected world, a diseased world, a failed world, a world that was already corrupted.

That speaks to either a conscious act of evil, or thorough incompetence.

The contradictions, as you can see, cannot be ignored. It is a failed narrative. But as I said, I’m not litigating the claims made in that religion, or any religion for that matter.

Unlike your religion, what I am proposing requires no excuse. Be it directed or free roaming, a species of callousness, of evil, explains the world that is, has been, and will be. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are made clear without a clever cover story, inventive pretext, convenient scapegoat or laboured advocacy; works of terrestrial imagination there only to rescue a pantomime Creator from the charge of incompetence while presenting an emotionally appealing apologia for why things are not as they should be had matter been persuaded to behave by a benevolent hand, rather than a coherent explanation for why things are as they are in the unignorable presence of a Creator.

So, the question is: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Unable to die, powerless to be no more, incapable of even experiencing the thrill of the fear of approaching annihilation, is it not inevitable that an uncreated aseitic being—God—would come, eventually, to focus His impossible powers to contrive artificial environments inside which profoundly ignorant avatars could be cultivated and grown to probe and explore this extraordinary curiosity; evolving surrogates through whom He, the Creator, could taste the fear He alone could never experience, feel the suffering He alone could never know, and meet every pedigree of oblivion denied to Him by dying vicariously?

Hi @john: Thanks for the panoramic and somewhat poetic response. However, I believe you have failed to respond the argument presented. You have instead simply restated your position: That a Creator who allows evil must Himself be evil.

Your argument is a rather common one: If the Creator is maximally good and maximally powerful, he cannot allow suffering or evil. I am challenging your first premise — at least in the way you have defined it. You have defined good to mean committed to the goal that his creatures only experience what is good, that is, well-being. The allowance of suffering would therefore be a violation of goodness, so defined.

But with your definition of good, it would also mean a serial killer should not be punished for his or her atrocities. Such an idea of goodness, I would argue, is hopelessly simplistic and ultimately flawed. You are equating goodness with leniency.

On the contrary, I would argue that goodness defined outside a rather limited and egocentric view (i.e. one that only benefits us) is one whose goal is not that his creatures simply experience what is good, but choose what is good. Such a Creator is willing to sacrifice our well-being in exchange for our right to choose it.

And I believe this underscores insanitybytes’ argument: In the third world, suffering is not automatically assumed to be a violation of divine justice; it is usually in the first world that we assume, a priori, we are entitled to certain things before our Creator, the most paramount being that we not suffer.

Granted, you may feel that a maximally good Creator would not even allow the possibility for evil, or for choice, in the first place, but you would have to prove that this is so. It is not logically necessary that a benevolent Creator disallow the possibility of evil.

If it is easier for you, you can still call the Creator I have just described — one who allows for the ability of his creatures to choose evil (be they humans or angels, mind you), and one whose highest goal is not that his creatures experience good, but choose good — as evil. Most, however, would call this just and holy.

Lastly, if you do not mind, stating you are not responding to the Christian position while in fact responding to the Christian position is a noble attempt at rhetoric, but in keeping with the fairy tale theme, I quote Wesley from the Princess Bride: “We are men of action; lies do not become us.”

Your argument is a rather common one: If the Creator is maximally good and maximally powerful, he cannot allow suffering or evil. I am challenging your first premise — at least in the way you have defined it. You have defined good to mean committed to the goal that his creatures only experience what is good, that is, well-being. The allowance of suffering would therefore be a violation of goodness, so defined.

You seem to have created a rather brightly coloured straw man here, Patrick. That is not my argument, and I have not defined “good.” I have defined evil, which is, the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced

Granted, you may feel that a maximally good Creator would not even allow the possibility for evil, or for choice, in the first place, but you would have to prove that this is so. It is not logically necessary that a benevolent Creator disallow the possibility of evil.

My feelings are not important here. The narrative is what you must defend, and that narrative says your particular Creator is “good.”

Mark 10:18 “And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.”

If this was not the claim then your particular religion would not be saturated with inventive theodicies… Excuses, as I have pointed out, for why for why things are not as they should be had matter been persuaded to behave by a benevolent hand, rather than a coherent explanation for why things are as they are in the unignorable presence of a Creator.

As I have also pointed out, but which you appear to have simply ignored, is that the narrative you are defending is, by its own chronology, fundamentally flawed. Man is not responsible for evil. Creation had already failed before your god created man. Creation was diseased, which indicates either malevolence or incompetence in the act of creating man, casting him into a world already on fire.

So, given that the Christian narrative is a failed narrative, we must look again as to explain why there is something rather than nothing, and most importantly, why that something is shaped and behaves the way it does.

We have 13.8 billion years to survey.

That, Patrick, is my argument. if you wish to engage it, then by all means do so. I’d be more than happy to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Beautifully written! I hope you find ways to help your kids understand how blessed they are without a third-world poverty crash course, but sadly, so often, we don’t appreciate what we have until we try not having it. 🙂

God could have created anything he wanted to. He didn’t. He created what we see now.

Before he created her, God knew that Eve was going to force Adam to choose between herself and God. God could have created someone different. He didn’t.

For the sake of brevity, let’s call Eve “the problem”. The Bible says that God created the plan of salvation before he created this present world. In different words, God created a solution to “the problem” BEFORE he created “the problem”. If he wasn’t already planning to create “the problem”, INTENTIONALLY create “the problem”, why would he have created the solution? (Not saying that God made Eve sin; saying God could have created her so that she wouldn’t sin, and chose not to.)

In calling his creation “good”, God could have only meant that it turned out exactly the way he wanted it to. The Bible seems to be pretty clear on telling us that God created exactly what he wanted to create, for his own reasons – regardless of what we understand about it or what we think of it.

God created the earth. Then he created a garden and placed man into it. When man sinned, God drove him out of the garden and into a world that most likely was still in the state it was in right after God created it. Disagree? If the ground would easily yield its harvest to Adam as soon as Adam was created, why then did God make a garden for Adam? It seems that garden wouldn’t have been necessary if the natural world was not resistant to the labor of man as soon as Adam was created. Which is to say, the earth God created would yield its harvest only after great sweat and tears had been expended in tilling and planting and fertilizing and harvesting and storing. If that is true, then we can see that the earth, in its natural state right after creation, was not “good” for those frail in health. It could even be considered “evil”, in that it would not willingly give up its harvest to the weak, who would die without that harvest. (Again, if not true, then why the garden?)

In Isaiah 45:7, God says: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”

If you believe that God is not the author of confusion, then you must accept that the number 6 follows the number 1. In Revelations, the Red Dragon (supposedly Satan) is not thrown out of heaven until the 6th Trumpet has sounded (regardless of what Daniel and Isaiah say). That hasn’t happened yet, unless you want to also believe that the Beast has appeared and that the two witnesses have been killed, laid dead in the streets for three days, and then were resurrected. Along with a few other things that (will) occur when Trumpets 1 through 5 blow.

Isaiah 14:2 introduces the word “lucifer” as a proper noun. Jerome created the word for use in the Vulgate and intended its use as a common noun, and used that common noun multiple times in the Vulgate, in multiple situations. Somehow, that one instance of lucifer in our Bible got turned into Satan (proper noun), because mention is made of Eden in Isaiah 14 – and Satan was in Eden wih Adam and Eve doncha know. Inquiring minds will discover in Isaiah 13 (if memory serves) that Eden was listed, among others, as a trading partner of the king that is the subject of Isaiah 14. When Isaiah 14 references the king and Eden, it was a current reference – given that they were trading partners. (For the connection between the king and Eden, you need to only go back one Chapter – not all the way back to the Garden of Eden.) Plus, the Bible nowhere states that Satan was present with Adam and Eve in the Garden. The serpent was cursed to forever travel on it’s belly. In Job, we see Satan coming before God, fresh from walking to and fro on the earth. Can’t do that easily on your belly.

That is just a little taste of a much more complicated argument / discussion that invokes the whole counsel of the Scripture. It is there for those willing to study it (the Bible), rather than only study the catechism of those who would have you interpret things their way rather than the Bible’s way (see Martin Luther’s epiphany). The few thoughts presented above (among many more that could be presented) calls into question many of the things that have been said above, on both sides of the argument there.

My position has always been that God created everything. I am only the created. I’ve always taken Isaiah 45:9 as a guiding principle: (God speaking) “Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?'” God is the creator. He can make anything he wants to, for whatever reason he wants to. Who am I to call him to account over it? It’s his world. He made it. He can do anything with it that he wants to. How can I compete with that? Who am I, the created, to try and define God, the creator, and his intentions?

My point: God is God. God is the creator of everything. IB and others seem to have a fixation on calling God “good”. Who cares whether he actually is good? What he is is God! The creator of everything. The only thing worth saying is “God is God”. That trumps anything else that one could say about God. In that context, no other adjectives or adverbs matter – regardless of whether, by our puny definitions, we consider them good or evil. Our minds cannot begin to comprehend the “all” of who God is. Why should we believe that our definitions of him are anywhere close to accurate (what does our definition of “good” mean to the creator of the universe anyway?). Let our minds rest on this one proclamation that does not depend upon our ability to understand: God is God, the creator of whatever he wants to create, for whatever reason he wants to create it.

God created a solution to “the problem” BEFORE he created “the problem”.

Well, that’s certainly novel Christian theology.

My point: God is God. God is the creator of everything. IB and others seem to have a fixation on calling God “good”. Who cares whether he actually is good? What he is is God!

Yes. Now, jettison your particular Christian narrative altogether (it’s a thoroughly, hopelessly failed narrative), and take what conclusions you have (correctly) arrived at and rationally apply those conclusions to 13.8 billion years of evolutionary history, and the one thing an aseitic being cannot do.

An aseitic being cannot not be.

An aseitic being cannot die.

Alone and with an eternity bottled in a single timeless moment to contemplate this defect (this incompleteness in what should have been rigorously complete), such an unexpected curiosity could not help but grow into a fat, noisy obsession; a category of madness, but not insanity. Not at first. Not completely. Not something chaotic. Not something uncontrolled. In its infancy, not being able to not be could only be classified as a dangerously alluring seed, the mother of all “Wet Paint” signs, and the irrepressible urge to ‘touch’ the analogous paint is, it appears, the reason for why there is something rather than nothing.

As I wrote earlier to Patrick, unable to die, powerless to be no more, incapable of even experiencing the thrill of the fear of approaching annihilation, and yet blessed with all the powers necessary to explore this fantastic anomaly, it was inevitable that a non-contingent aseitic being (that seminal consciousness: God) would come, eventually, to gather and focus His impossible powers to contrive artificial environments inside which He could cultivate all those things He, the Creator, could never directly experience in the actual world. Incapable however of even knowing the depth and scope of fear and terror and annihilation, such environments (tourable theme parks, in a manner of speaking) could never be built complete; not as some pre-packaged pits of despair inside which readymade sentient avatars could be released to suffer the full force of every ill imaginable.

Such things would be unknowable, and being unknowable these artificial worlds could only ever be fashioned in such a way that they could self-experiment and freely evolve from some basal expression fixed between concepts He, the Creator, could never touch, but could impose on an artificial scape: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Inside these sealed-off worlds (these self-complicating petri dishes) profoundly ignorant avatars could be cultured and grown; evolving surrogates raised like experimental animals to probe and explore this extraordinary curiosity, and through these proxies He, the Creator, could taste the fear He alone could never experience, feel the suffering He alone could never know, and meet every pedigree of oblivion denied to Him by dying vicariously.

In a word, St. Thomas Aquinas was emphatically, hopelessly wrong. It was not goodness that spilled out into the world, shaping that which had no shape, bonum diffusivum sui, but a spectacular weave of perversion born of a simple but ultimately irresistible compulsion to explore and experience (through evolving proxies) that single thing an uncreated aseitic being—God—could never alone explore or ever directly experience: death, and all the exotic abstractions associated to it.

This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is the stuff of all nightmares, a living daymare, a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness.

Wow, IB. You sure know how to stir things up. 🙂 I was pretty busy today and it took 2 or 3 peeks to read through all the exceedingly long comments. I wouldn’t know where to begin to unravel the string of what was said, and I don’t think I want to. I will just chime on this thought about God and the problem of evil…

God is love. Love defines God. We don’t theologically balance God out with other attributes, like justice and holiness, because all of these are subsumed within and directed by love. He acts in other-centered, self-giving love within the Trinitarian life of God: the Father loves the Son, and vise versa. Which means God is about relationship before He is about anything else. This is true apart from His creation and before the foundation of the world. Before angels, before matter… By creating humankind, He chose to widen the Circle to include us in that Relationship. He is good because He is love. Everything in Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is about whether we will find this out or not. And whether we will choose to walk this other-centered, self-giving love with Him. As Jesus said, loving God and loving others sums up all the Law and Prophets. There is no greater truth or pursuit.

And love is greater than power. I can have the power to make people do anything I command, but I will never know their potential or know their love. Nothing is added to me. There is no true communion. Love requires a relationship between two free people who choose to give up their freedom for the other. Love risks the object of its affection to completely reject His overture. Love risks us totally misunderstanding Him, ignoring Him, making up stories about Him, and even hating Him. But evil is not a creation of God, it’s the failure to love (in spite of the bad translation of Isa.45:7, God does not create evil. That verse is taken terribly out of its context).

So, God didn’t create evil any more than He created the absence of light. There is no evil between the Father and the Son in the Spirit, so evil cannot be part of God or from God. As James says, He doesn’t make us do evil. We follow after our own misguided heart to do evil. Again, evil is the failure to love. So, yes, God allows our failure to love and do evil. That’s the risk He takes for love.

Just like a marriage, I can have a good one or a bad one. A bad marriage is not God’s fault or His creation. It’s what I chose to do in the relationship. God gives us grace to succeed, even Himself dwelling within, but I can choose my own way and choose to live my life without Him. And I can do the right thing and still be affected and suffer from seven billion other people’s failure to love. But that’s not on God; He gave us the planet to take care of. We can only point the finger at ourselves.

God is not evil nor is He incompetent. He is love, therefore we have been given the greatest gift of all…freedom. I will leave it at that, my comment is already exceedingly long, too! 🙂

Christian theology says the Creator is an aseitic being. He seemed to be implying the Creator wasn’t.

Now, granted, very few apologists are brave enough to actually get into this subject because it’s very easy to say the Creator is aseitic, it ticks all the right boxes, but it also raises all sorts of ghastly problems (when defining that Creator as “good”) which the typical apologist cannot handle.

It seems Mel has stubled into that problem and wants to have his theology both ways… which is somewhat disengenuous.

Actually, there is a ghastly problem in that nothing is outside an aseitic being, meaning evil is a part God. It’s a contradiction to the definition of a perfectly “good” being. This is why the narrative you cling to is a failed one. It’s riddled with contradictions that require excuses (theodicies) just to barely stand up.

This is why my thesis is far, far superior. Yes, the Creator is aseitic, but this world is artificial. It is fixed between the three things an aseitic being cannot experience. Ever. A beginning, a middle, and an end.

“This is why the narrative you cling to is a failed one…..This is why my thesis is far, far superior.”

Okay, but your “far superior” thesis is simply a figment of your own imagination, just the vain imaginings of a bit of biological goo that sprung forth from nothingness. So really what you are worshipping is just the vanity produced by some mis-firing neurons.

“How can observing 13.8 billion years of evolutionary history be a “figment of my imagination”?”

Unless you are 13.8 billion years old, you could not possibly have “observed” 13.8 billion years of so called evolutionary history. So what you are doing is putting your faith in something you have never seen and deluding yourself into believing it is your own personal observation.

You are also clinging to a narrative that insists you are an aseitic being. You also believe yourself to be “good” which is somewhat funny. Than you project that entire solipsistic mess onto a God you claim to not even believe in.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

You have simply placed your faith in a belief and are now trying to rational-lies it.

You are kind of like a man staring at his shadow and claiming you now have irrefutable proof that there is no light. It doesn’t even occur to you that in the absence of light you would have no shadow to even observe.

When I saw this comment of one of the self created gods I laughed in pity.

A man constructs a ‘thesis’ and declares the Creator irrelevant or evil, then claims his own dirty words and paltry arguments are worthy of the victory. As if there is one hint of a weakness in scripture.

Pity. Laughable. Dereliction of the human mind. Sorry for the cruel words msb, but I must wonder just exactly how patient God must be, to put up with such blatant arrogance and pretended intellect while men enjoy the very terra firma which belongs to Him..

I’m not implying anything, I pretty much directly said that God did not create evil. Evil is not a creation or a thing, anymore than the absence of light. Evil is the result of failing to walk in other-centered, self-giving love.
So, my point is, this does not deny God’s aseity.

With all due respect, your understanding of aseity seems to be fundamentally flawed. It means, in as few words as possible, that nothing is outside an aseitic being. No-thing. Evil, which does exist, therefore, is a part of the aseitic Creator you’re appealing to. If, then, you place the existence of evil (of suffering) at the feet of man (which the chronology of your narrative actually thoroughly contradicts, but that’s another topic) you are negating the thesis of maximum goodness.

I know what aseity means. It simply means that God is self-existent and self-sustaining. It doesn’t mean He’s a micro-managing control freak, or that every consequence is His creation.

So, I would respectfully disagree with your premise. Just because God allowed for the possibility of the failure to love (evil), doesn’t mean He created it.
Secondly, I never said this failure was confined to man. Certainly, angelic beings can fail to walk in other-centered, self-giving love. Certainly, creation can suffer the consequences of this failure. It doesn’t follow that God created it. God allowed the consequences because love requires the freedom on the part of the object of one’s affections to reciprocate. If we don’t understand this, we don’t understand or know God (1 John 4:7-21).

Just because God allowed for the possibility of the failure to love (evil), doesn’t mean He created it … It doesn’t follow that God created it

Exactly, because by your proposition that evil already existed in the aseitic Creator. It is not a new phenomenon. Nothing can be a “new” phenomenon to an aseitic being. As such, your thesis of maximum goodness fails.

As I have detailed to other’s on this thread, there is only one thing an aseitic being cannot do: it cannot not be.

This is how we know this world is an artificial construct, for it is sealed between the three things an aseitic being cannot experience: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The question then is: why did the Creator fashion this artificial world? To what purpose does it serve?

@john: “Exactly, because by your proposition that evil already existed in the aseitic Creator. It is not a new phenomenon. Nothing can be a “new” phenomenon to an aseitic being. As such, your thesis of maximum goodness fails. ”

I mean nothing of the kind and I don’t accept your definition of aseity. Evil does not exist in God, nor does it need to for Him to be uncreated and self-existent. Evil stands in contrast and opposed to love. Love, by its very nature, allows free will to reject it. You clearly don’t understand the nature of love, so there’s no point in going further on this.
And, as I said in my original comments, the purpose of creation was to expand this Circle of love between the Father, Son, and Spirit, to include us in this perichoresis…the divine dance as it was called, because love desires to express itself to others and be in communion and relationship. That’s the purpose of the world.
I’m going to have to leave it at that with you. I have a very busy day.
I wish you the best, John.

You do not “accept” my definition of aseity? My definition? I’m afraid Mel, it is not my definition for you not to accept. It simply is the definition of aseity.

My apologies, but no matter how hard you might wish it otherwise, “alternative facts” don’t exist in the real world.

You see, this is why I mentioned to Inanity that very few apologists enter discussions concerning the supposed aseitic nature of the god of the Pentateuch. In a matter of seconds, apologists, such as yourself, get all knotted up in impossible contradictions, and when you see that your worldview has collapsed you dismiss the entire discussion and run away.

I don’t know what definition you dreamed up in your world, but aseity simply means that God is self-sufficient, independent and self-existent.
Evil exists apart from God’s self-sufficiency, in creation as a consequence of failure to love (which is in direct contradiction to God’s nature).
Therefore, God is not evil, nor does He create evil.
If you understood the nature of love, you would know why this is so, even though it’s contrary to God’s nature and will.

These the facts in the “real world” of theology, John. Simple logic. You can believe whatever version you want and imagine you have the truth, it doesn’t make it so.

Yes, self-sufficiency (being wholly contained) is one aspect of aseity. More importantly, it means nothing is outside the Creator, He is the source of all things… He brought into and sustains in existence everything else that is (Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology). This is what you are ignoring. And believe me, I understand why you’re ignoring it. It raises a slew of godawful (impossible) problems for the apologist trying to defend the proposition of a maximally good Creator.

That is why your thesis is a failed thesis.

That is why it’s so important to consider the one and only thing an aseitic being cannot do: an aseitic being cannot not be.

An aseitic being cannot experience a beginning, a middle, and an end… and yet these are the three things that define this world we have awoken in, uninvited.

Only one explanation, therefore, faces all facts: This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is the stuff of all nightmares, a living daymare, a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness.

That, Mel, is what 13.8 billion years of evolutionary history informs us of.

You are hypostatizing evil as a thing. Again, evil is not an entity. Evil is the failure or absence of something. Evil is not part of God anymore than a shadow is part of God. Your logic is flawed and absurd. You clearly don’t understand the nature of God, nor do you seem to care to, so I’m not interested in continuing here.

Evil is not a thing. Suffering is. Evil is defined here as the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced, and when we survey 13.8 billion years of evolutionary history we see an unmistakable pattern to complexity, where complexity corresponds precisely to a forever expanding ecology of suffering, both real, and, with the appropriate neurological capacity, imagined.

This is an established and irrefutable historical fact of this world.

We are inside a complexity machine, and suffering (a negative emotional state which derives from adverse physical, physiological and psychological circumstances) is amplifying through creation. It is growing, and it is growing without interruption or meaningful regress.

Consider this simple fact, Mel: happiness did not even exist in this world until some 210 million years ago when terrestrial life stumbled upon the chemicals (enkephalin) and cellular structures (opioid receptors) with which it could begin to recognise the first spasms of something not unlike ‘happiness.’

Mel, could a designer of extraordinary compassion and unlimited means oversee a world where the very mechanisms necessary to physically experience something beginning to resemble ‘happiness’ (enkephalin and opioid receptors) would not even exist in the world before some 3.5 billion years of terrestrial evolution had passed and untold billions of generations of living things had suffered enormously without as much as the hope of corporeal relief?

To suggest such a thing with a hint of even accidental sincerity is bravely ridiculous.

So, to conclude, it you, I’m afraid Mel, who have clearly mischaracterised the nature of the Creator.

@john: “This is an established and irrefutable historical fact of this world.”

Haha…right. Whatever… I love when skeptic know-it-all’s pull out this trump card. Whatever…now we’re entering into the twilight zone of irrefutable historical facts!
And I can see why you don’t believe in God. You’re God is pure fiction based on bad theology.

Mel, Hydrogen fuses into the heavier and more complex helium, helium fuses into the heavier and more complex carbon, helium and carbon combine to make the heavier and more complex oxygen. Single atoms come together to form simple compounds, simple compounds bind to produce double compounds, double compounds bond to fashion simple molecules, molecules marry to create amino acids, amino acids coalesce to model catalysing proteins and enzymes, and proteins and enzymes experiment to prototype self-replicating systems where, according to the accepted paradigm of evolutionary biology, there is a continuum from simple to more complex organisms.

This is Creation’s impulse, its outward disposition and core personality. It answers to but one basal command, knows but one timeless commission: to persist and grow more complex over time, and as it tumbles forward, gathering content, so too does the amount and variety of evil present in the world.

What is this universe, after all, but a working example of what hydrogen can do if given a few critical rules and 13.82 billion years to play with gravity?

We are all hydrogen’s diaspora.

We are all, quite literally, discrete, momentarily unique, progressively more complicated incidents in that first elements free roaming, snowballing adventure. From helium to humans, battle plans to lazy afternoon sea breezes, a dust mote on a cat’s whisker to the very thought behind the ink on this page, everything in this universe of hard stuff and nebulous things is nothing but steadily more sophisticated datum points in a billions years-long migration of the simplest of all matter.

Said most economically by Philosopher and Evolutionary Biologist, Kelly Smith, this world, the universe, Creation, is a complexity machine:

“The large scale history of the universe strongly suggests a trend of increasing complexity: disordered energy states produce atoms and molecules, which combine to form suns and associated planets, on which life evolves. Life then seems to exhibit its own pattern of increasing complexity, with simple organisms getting more complex over evolutionary time until they eventually develop rationality and complex culture. And recent theoretical developments in Biology and complex systems theory suggest this trend may be real, arising from the basic structure of the universe in a predictable fashion … If this is right, you can look at the universe as a kind of ‘complexity machine’”

So, Yes, Mel… It is an established and irrefutable historical fact of this world.

Thanks for the science lesson. Totally irrelevant to the subject at hand. God is NOT His creation, which is the very definition of the aseity of God.

John: “And Mel… Care to address that fact that the very mechanisms necessary to experience “happiness” did not even exist in this world until 210 million years ago?”

Yes, TOTAL BALONEY! Maybe other people are fascinated with these wild speculations that you cannot possibly prove, but I’m not. You are wandering into the ridiculous postulations.
I’m done talking here. Thanks but I’m not buying your “history” (sic).

I believe you challenged the fact that this world is a complexity machine? If you can’t defend what you write, Mel, I would suggest you think a little more carefully in the future before challenging what is written.

God is NOT His creation

Your own narrative contradicts that. John 1:3 states that All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

And as Norman Geisler details in Systematic Theology He brought into and sustains in existence everything else that is.

Yes, TOTAL BALONEY!

I’m afraid not. Would you like another science lesson? Enkephalin and opioid receptors (the physical mechanisms necessary for an organism to experience ‘happiness’) evolved only 210 million years ago.

So, how do you explain that, Mel?

Is that the hand of a benevolent being?

Now, do consider this further… As singularly astonishing as it may have been, this stunning biological milestone (enkephalin and opioid receptors) did not however end suffering. It did not even signal the beginning to the end of suffering. As is the disposition of this world, it instead amplified evil in new and spectacular ways by giving organisms a unique and innovative means to better measure their misery.

Once tasted and enjoyed, happiness could be desired, and when absent, craved for. In a cruel but inevitable twist, this newly minted capacity—this talent—for emotional relief served only to create a new addiction, dressing ordinary (physiological) hunger in a splendid new coat of psychological longing.

Who amongst the sane and capable would not, after all, want to be happy? Who then amongst the seemingly sane and capable is not covertly driven just that little bit deeper into the expanding ecology of suffering?

Well, well, IB, I finally got to the current end of the comments here, and had to think what I was going to write. I sure wasn’t in response to the other commenters, they are way over my head,
Voila, I remembered, in your post you mentioned “entitlement”. Very interesting, because this past Sunday our Pastor began a series on “Respectable Sins”, and the first one of the four he is speaking on is the “sin of entitlement” which runs amuck in the Christian church community. Easy to understand, when one stops to think and consider all that goes on and is said amongst Christ Followers.
Thanks as always for your skillful writing, with intelligence.

Some comments made of your growing up are attention grabbing. Have you, or have you considered writing a book, or at the least, a booklet of your testimony of life, and what our Lord Jesus has done in your life and through your life. It sounds challenging, uplifting, God Glorifying, and people helping. Probably in written form could help even more who have not discovered your blog yet.
Food for thought to nibble on,
God’s Blessings IB,
George

Excellent post! You get it. If you come from poverty and suffering it helps you so immensely in getting over yourself and appreciating every crumb you get tossed in life. I think of my life experiencing loss of a child, severe illnesses, poverty, abuse, neglect and know in my heart I could have had it much worse. I’ve seen much worse. I have always placed God first in my life but bad things still happen and I ask God why even though I know the answer. It is what it is and I imagine the other things He has protected me from. Jesus said to gather your treasures for heaven, not for earth. The lowest on earth will be the highest in heaven.